This invention relates to a device for removing deer ticks and the like from a person's skin.
Deer ticks are small arachnids (slightly larger than the related mites) which attach themselves to warm blooded vertebrate to feed. These bloodsucking parasitic insects, often found in heavily wooded areas, are carriers of many infectious diseases. A recent increase in the incidence of Lyme's Disease is widely considered to have been caused by the spread of the disease through deer ticks.
Recreational activities such as hiking, fishing, hunting and camping in wooded areas expose a human being to the possibility of a deer tick becoming attached to his or her body. Once on the skin, the deer tick drives its stinger through the skin in order to access the blood flow to feed, thereby providing a path for transmitting diseases carried by the tick. It is therefore imperative that the deer tick be removed before the stinger has full penetrated the skin.
At the end of a day in the woods, a person should check his or her body for the presence of deer ticks. By that time, however, the tick may have imbedded itself in the skin (although the stinger has not yet fully penetrated the skin) so that removal may be difficult. Merely pulling the tick off of the skin with one's finger tips or with a tweezers may result in breaking the body of the tick away from the stinger, leaving the stinger in the skin. One method of effecting complete removal of the tick, both body and stinger, is by lighting a match and then, immediately after extinguishing the flame, placing the hot embers against the tick. The hot match tends to cause the tick to back off of the skin, at that point enabling one to easily remove the tick in its entirety. This method of removing deer ticks, however, is both cumbersome and painful.